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Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Timothy Mitchell. Berkeley, CA, and London, UK: University of California Press, 2002. xiii + 413 pp. (Cloth US$49.95; Paper US$19.95)
This groundbreaking book claims that contemporary critical theorists have not yet challenged the concept of "the economy," which retains certain rigid core notions from nineteenth-century social science. The alternatives proposed by anthropological studies of non-Western ways of economic life, Timothy Mitchell maintains, only reproduce these core notions. Even one of the most celebrated recent trends in social science-insisting that so-called "natural" or "ahistorical" phenomena are in fact socially constructed and have complicated histories-fails to subvert the core notions because it reproduces the modernist split between object and representation, reality and imagination. Rejecting these approaches, Mitchell forcefully argues that the economy is made as the effect of techno-power, rather than "emancipated," "constructed," or "imagined."
To orient his argument, Mitchell extends the conceptual framework outlined in his Colonizing Egypt (1988). Instead of situating the economy in the comfortable analytic space defined by such binary oppositions as nature/society or material world/ representations, Mitchell explores the radical socio-technical transformations that made these binaries possible. He analyzes emerging powers to change the world according to new ideas of order and the techniques of government employed to create previously nonexistent actors and social spaces for possible actions.
Mitchell questions two basic principles of modern social science. One is universality: the idea that something can become an object of study only if considered in relation to something more general, say, a trend in history or the rise of the nation-state. The second principle is that agents are always human. These two principles make social science predictable, because the observer-analyst knows in advance who counts as an agent and therefore can always distinguish "agency" from passive nonhuman elements (p. 29). By contrast, Mitchell argues that agency is made, not something that exists prior to action in a complete form and,...